Paralleling the Europe-is-doomed-to-Islamization wailings which have become an odd fetish of the right in North America, we also often hear that Russia is heading for a similar fate based on its low ethnic-Russian birthrate and the higher birthrate of its Muslims -- who, after all, already make up about 15% of Russia's total population, compared with less than 4% of that of the EU.

I never believed this would really happen in Russia any more than in western Europe, mainly because Russia is culturally tougher, more ruthless, and less infected with political correctness than western Europe is, and the Russians would simply never allow the Muslims to dominate Russia, no matter how brutal the actions they had to take in order to prevent it.

But it turns out that there's another factor at work. According to an authoritative survey carried out by Russia's leading polling agency VTsIOM and the newspaper Izvestiya, the actual number of people who self-identify as Muslims is only 6% of Russia's population, not 15%.

The 15% figure usually given is arrived at simply by adding up all the ethnic groups in Russia -- Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, etc. -- which are historically Muslim. But today, evidently, the majority of members of those groups no longer self-identify as Muslim.What this means is that over the course of the last century or so, the majority of the people of Muslim origin in Russia must have abandoned their Islamic belief to the extent that they no longer even call themselves Muslim in a survey -- and in any culture, self-identification is usually the last aspect of a religion to disappear (as one can see from cases such as western Europe, where surveys often show large numbers of people self-identifying as "Christian" or "Catholic" or "Protestant" even though more detailed study shows that many of them do not actually practice their claimed religion or even believe in God).

Especially in a culture where apostasy is as taboo as it is in Islam, the ability to acknowledge "I am not a Muslim" is the last step, not the first. So it seems very likely that even many of the remaining 6% have little that is deeply Muslim about them, much like those native Europeans who still claim the name "Christian" even after abandoning the substance.

What this means is that over the course of the last century or so, the majority of the people of Muslim origin in Russia must have abandoned their Islamic belief to the extent that they no longer even call themselves Muslim

Something is not right here because if you are taking about the course of last century then in 1990 USSR got divided and there was no "Russia" before that. When USSR was divided most of the countries that seperated were muslims except Ukraine and them in eastern europe. So is the decreasing number you are talking about due to the division of Russia?

And, indeed, the people of Yemen. Regardless of whether Islam did indeed die out in Russia since this thread was last active.

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah